THE OPEN SOURCE

DEVELOPER REPORT

2010 EC L I PSE CO M M U N IT Y S U R V E Y

J U N E 2010

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T A B L E OF C O NT E NT S

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.......................................................................................3

METHODOLOGY..................................................................................................4

DEMOGRAPHICS................................................................................................5

THE DEVELOPER DESKTOP.............................................................................8

APPLICATION STYLE .......................................................................................16

THE DEPLOYMENT ENVIRONMENT................................................................20

OPEN SOURCE MATURITY...............................................................................24

ECLIPSE COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION.........................................................26

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Eclipse is a large, vibrant, well-established open source community with over 200 open

source projects, close to 1,000 committers, 160 plus member companies, thousands of

companies embedding Eclipse into products and applications and million of users.

Eclipse began as a Java IDE but has evolved into a much larger and more diverse open

source community. Eclipse has become a major destination for people involved in

developing software that includes open source software.

In April 2010, the Eclipse Foundation undertook a survey of the Eclipse community to

better understand how people are using Eclipse, using other open source software

(OSS) and participating in open source communities. The purpose was to create a

profile of how open source developers interact with the community.

Key Survey Highlights

Among the highlights revealed by The Open Source Developer Report:

» Linux continues to gain market share on the developer desktop. Close to one

third of developers (33%) now use Linux as their primary development operating

system; this is up from 20% in 2007. In parallel Microsoft Windows has dropped

from 74% in 2007 to 58% in 2010. Linux continues to be the most popular

deployment operating system.

» Developers continue to use open source solutions in their software development

environment. Respondents report JQuery and Spring are the most popular

frameworks for building RIA and server side applications.

» Deploying to a cloud infrastructure is a current option or planned option for 29.5%

of the respondents. Amazon EC2, Google App Engine and a private cloud are

the popular choices for those considering a cloud infrastructure.

» Eclipse users tend to use the most recent version of Eclipse. A large majority of

developers use the most current Eclipse Galileo release (75.5%) or a milestone

build (7.1%).

» 89.1% are satisfied or very satisfied with Eclipse.

Complete survey results are available in xls and ods format:

xls: http://www.eclipse.org/org/community_survey/Summary_Data_2010.xls

ods: http://www.eclipse.org/org/community_survey/Summary_Data_2010.ods

METHODOLOGY

The survey was promoted to individuals who visited the eclipse.org home page during

the period of April 15 - May 15, 2010. On average, the eclipse.org home page receives

approximately 1 million unique visitors per month. The survey was also promoted: 1) on

the Eclipse Foundation newsgroup, 2) in a blog post that also appeared on

PlanetEclipse, and 3) a number of times via Twitter.

The number of responses from Germany (25.7%) and France (15.4%) is significantly

higher than other countries. We assume this is due to press coverage of the survey in

those local markets. However, we don't believe this biased the survey results.

The survey was written in English and the eclipse.org website is only available in

English, so the representation is limited to English-speaking users. The survey is biased

to Eclipse users. However, respondents did not need to be an Eclipse user to complete

the survey. Due to the large penetration of Eclipse in the Java developer community, we

also believe the survey sample is a close approximation to the Java developer

community.

In total 1,948 individuals responded to the survey and 1,696 completed the entire

survey. The results in this report are based on the 1,696 completed surveys. The

survey can be found at: <insert url>.

Similar surveys were conducted in August 2007 and April 2009. The results for these

surveys can be found at (2007) http://www.eclipse.org/org/press-

release/20071106_cbsurvey.php and (2009) http://www.eclipse.org/org/press-

release/20090527_survey09.php . In this report we will make comparisons between the

survey results.

THE DEVELOPER DESKTOP

A definite trend is emerging towards the preferred operating system of the developer

desktop. In 2007, 74% of the developers indicated that Windows was their primary

development operating system. In the 2010 survey this number has dropped to 58.3%,

a drop of 16 points and a 6 point drop from the 2009 survey. Developers appear to be

shifting away from Microsoft Windows to Linux for their development operating system.

32.7% of respondents, an increase of almost 6 points from 2009, use a variant of Linux

on their desktop, Ubuntu (18.3%) being the most popular followed by Fedora (4.7%).

Mac OSX grew from 6.9% to 7.9% between 2009 and 2010.

73.8%

20.0%

3.5% 2.7%

64.3%

26.9%

6.9%

1.9%

58.3%

32.7%

7.9%

1.1%

Windows Linux Mac OSX Other OS

Primary Operating System for Software Developement

2007-2010

2007 2009 2010

THE DEPLOYMENT ENVIRONMENT

Developers need to deploy their applications into a production deployment environment.

The survey asked about the primary operating system, database and application server

that were used to deploy their applications.

Linux continues to be the most popular deployment operating system at 44%, followed

by Windows at 39%. Unlike the development operating system, between the 2009 and

2010 surveys there doesn't appear to be significant change in the primary deployment

operating system.

46%

41%

2%3%

3%3% 2%

14. What is your primary operating system for software

<i>deployment</i>? (Choose one.)

Linux

MS Windows

Mac OSX

Other

Sun Solaris/OpenSolaris

Unix (AIX, HP-UX)

Embedded

0.0% 10.0% 20.0% 30.0% 40.0% 50.0% 60.0%

Does not allow the use of any open source software

Uses open source software, but does not interact with

open source project communities in any way

Uses open source software and contributes back

(through bug reports, code, resources) to at least one

open source project community to help improve the

quality of the projects we consume

Contributes significant development resources

(contributors, committers and/or maintainers, project

leaders) to at least one open source project community

in order to help influence the evolution of the projects …

Has a business model that relies on open source

software for its success

2007

2009

2010